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I sometimes remember dreams from easily 15y - 20y ago absolutly vividly, although I have had forgotten them in the mean time. Suddenly, during the day, like in a split second (maybe triggered from a scene or scent) I feel that "feeling" (or more like a superposition of all impression of that dream i had) of a dream long lost and the dream is fully present in that moment and I kind of "remember" it completely. Then it is fading away fast.
Every so often I have these vivid dreams with what feels like long story archs. In my youth / pre 30s more often then now. At the end of my 20s I started to keep a dream diary, not very consistently, but still.
So now, when I have these dream flashbacks, I immeadiately grab this journal or a piece of paper. I write everything down and draw sketches of the scene and really try hard to remember specifics of that dream. And then something really weird happens... i start to remember scences form other forgotten dreams and it feels like I opened a door or pathway in my memory and can look/explore fragments of these dreams. And the harder I try the better results I get. It is really an odd experience.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2017/00000...
> Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences and the associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively correlated with the incidence and there was little gender dependence.
The weirdest thing for me is that I swear I have a separate set of memories in these different dream worlds; a personal history exclusive to that dream world, where once I'm in that dream world, I suddenly remember previous visits to that world, places I've visited, events that took place. It's an incredibly strange feeling that can momentarily make me question my sense of self.
I should note that I nearly always dream lucidly. Not sure if that plays a role in this phenomena.
Across a large street from my parents' home, there are some trees that kinda look like a beginning of a forest. In reality those are just a few densely growing trees, followed by more streets and houses. As a small child I didn't know, because we rarely walked in that direction, so in my dreams, there was a forest. Now I know what is actually there, and have walked there many times. But in the dream world, there still is a forest.
The dream map refuses to update and keeps the misconceptions of my childhood. Of course, during the dreams, it is a real map containing places that I merely "forgot" and "should visit again".
It makes you think.
Examples - one dream was set in a post apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with narration, there was a kingdom being misruled by a duke and the only one who would be able to stop him was the exiled bishop, his brother, I turned out to be the bishop - an old man returning after many years of exile to the kingdom etc. etc. there were sword fights, radiation monsters, extra sensory perception..
Another dream was a very long special episode of Laverne and Shirley were the girls came out and had their first kiss, I think it was a Christmas episode also.
Actually funny enough I had three dream flashbacks just a couple days ago, first I remembered a comic book store and then I remembered no that store was from a dream, then I remembered a couple other locations from dreams that I had not had for lots of years and had forgotten about.
If you're curious to discover whether you dream or not, have someone wake you when you're in REM sleep. Your favourite search engine will help you to determine when this is happening. Usual caveats apply about taking advice from a random person on the internet.
If you're not entering REM sleep but you feel fine, hey, nice. Contact a sleep scientist and ask if they want to study you.
If you enter REM but have no dreams, hey, nice. You're apparently in the minority. Contact a sleep scientist and all if you want to study you.
It helps to have enough sleep, not wake up with an alarm, not have anything important to do after waking up. Have a pen and paper next to the bed, to remind you. Think about how you want to remember your dream, as you are falling asleep.
If you don’t recall any of your dreams, AND you currently smoke, you could give it a try.
I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories -
1. I suddenly find myself naked in public, the rest of dream usually involves me trying to remedy the situation. This is the stage where I usually wake up (in a panic with elevated heart rate).
2. Snakes. Not even sure what is up with this one. I am pretty afraid of snakes in real life, more so than normal people. But then there's a bunch of other things I am equally scared of, but I don't dream about them at all.
In my case, there's some real-life precedent for it. I enrolled in one course in undergrad, and dropped it right away my first week or so for some reason I don't recall. Toward the end of the semester, before finals, I found I was still enrolled, but had never set foot in the classroom or anything.
I was sort of panicked, but went and talked to the professor, and he was fine with it. He basically verified that I never did anything with the class and it was somehow deleted from my record completely.
I still don't know why it wasn't dropped in the first week, although this was before electronic registration systems.
They underlying theme is probably low self-confidence.
There are definitely other themes but these are the most common.
1. I forget to take my mask when I leave my apartment. Apparently the door man doesn't notice.
2. When I try to go back to my apartment to retrieve my mask, the door man doesn't let me in, because you need a mask to enter.
3. I'm not allowed to enter any stores to buy a mask, because you need a mask to enter.
So I'm trapped outside in this catch-22.
Also rare, but in a similar vein, sometimes I wake up into a dream, over and over again. I'll be in bed, relieved I'm finally awake, until I soon realize I'm still asleep and wake up again. When this repeats enough times, it becomes pretty desperate.
Otherwise, I rarely have anxiety-inducing dreams.
Your fear of snakes is likely older than humanity itself, so even if you can have rational control of yourself around a snake in real life they could terrorize your dreams. Snakes used to be a real and present danger in our environment for millions of years of our evolution. They are the unknown environment, the cunning adversary, the unforeseen consequence of carelessness.
In a similar way, you might find that you can manage to present yourself in social situations, there is a very human fear of being found out, cast out, laughed at, and/or rejected socially, since we are social creatures. Even nudists have dreams of finding themselves naked in front of their peers. If you spend your day putting on a facade of some sort, which you probably do if you have a job, then somewhere there is a part of you that you don’t want others to see, and in your dream they all see it big time and you have to deal with it.
I remember having the "naked in public" dream in the past. I've also had a fair amount of body shame for most of my life.
But after getting in better shape and spending time on nude beaches and in the occasional (mixed gender) nude sauna in the last few years, my body shame pretty much disappeared. I now feel almost no self-consciousness from being naked.
I can't recall having a single "naked in public" dream since getting more comfortable with my body.
I guess it's a form of de-conditioning. We've been trained to expect this extremely negative response from others when we take our clothes off. Doing it over and over and receiving no negative response whatsoever seems to eventually alter the expectation.
Example: “waking” up on the last day of a semester, only to discover that I am enrolled in a required class that I never actually attended...woops.
These always involve either bathrooms from my past (such as at schools I once attended or at places I once worked) or bathrooms in places that as far as I can tell are dream places.
I don't recall these dreams ever involving a real bathroom that I currently had or recently had access to.
When I wake up and remember one of these broken bathroom dreams, I inevitably am in fact in need of an urgent trip to the bathroom, so I suspect that the dream is my sleeping mind's way of telling me I need to wake up and go.
When the dream bathrooms are real bathrooms from my past, such as at a school, they are usually exaggerated. If the real bathroom had 3 stalls the dream version might be much bigger with several dozen stalls with the real 3 merely the 3 closest the door.
I'm barefoot and the floor of the public bathroom is too disgusting to walk onto is a common one I get.
And then, yes, I awake to discover I need to go.
Another I've had is being at the top of a very tall skyscraper that starts shaking from an earthquake, and I have to get down somehow. Like everything around me is about to crumble and it's totally out of my control.
In most cases, dreams are the subconscious speaking to itself in an idiolect (a dialect of a single person). While certain themes are somewhat common, exact meaning of a dream is rooted in your own personal experiences and what those images mean to you.
Dreams of being naked in public are fairly common. Being naked is generally seen as a symbol of feeling vulnerable and, also, potentially intensely embarrassed about something (because most people would definitely not be comfortable being naked in public).
Snakes are a common symbol of sin in the Western world, which may or may not be pertinent to what it means to you/your subconscious.
Edit: I will add that sometimes dreams are just gibberish, like if you are feverish. "You're drunk, go home" type nonsense.
She's been visiting for a couple decades, but she just stares, so you get used to her. I figured it was one of those common ones like you have a surprise exam and you forgot your pencils or you have a candy bar for a head.
... go on?
The only recurring dream theme I have is this: You try to walk somewhere and it's slow, like moving in tar. It's exhausting and takes ages to e.g. walk down the street to your neighbor. Sometimes I'm even crawling trying to pull myself forward. I've heard similar variations from others too, so seems to be common.
Oh and my late grandmother had the same dream ever night for most of her adult life. Trauma in childhood due to war. I don't want to know how this feels.
At this point I can identify a few areas like "old town" or "business district" or "very large square with an enormous roundabout".
[0] Mostly various types of Ganz UVs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_UV which is interesting, because I've only been to Budapest once in my life.
Between my 20s and 30s I did a lot of selfdefense training. I would dream a lot about conflict situations where I would have to fight (or run). In real life I might have had 3 conflics in those 10 years. Anyhow, fighting in a dream was like being submerged in molasse: every movement had resistence and was painfully slow, while opponents moved normally. This was freaking me out.
I don't know if it's related, but sometimes in my dreams I fly by taking advantage of this oddly sluggish momentum. All it takes is to launch myself into a spinning motion like a frisbee, and I'll fly a good distance.
They really were weird. Maybe testosterone? Maybe Freudian? Maybe it was due to a stint job I had at the Coroner’s Office in high school? Maybe nothing?
Those dreams ended in my thirties, after a breakdown in grad school.
I pop a gasket (just really bad anxiety), and all those dreams subsided? Crazy?
Life became the nightmare after the breakdown though.
After having mostly fixed those problems I found that I was still anxious and unwilling to live in the now, always fearing the future or regretting the past. My dreams were nowhere to be found. For the longest time I felt like I was living in a nightmare.
These days, to some degree, I have returned to being somewhat calm and rational. Last week I've been waking up every morning, either in the middle of a vivid dream or at least with some recollection of what my dreams were that night. It's so soothing to have my dreams return. It makes me feel even more calm and rational (my favorite state of mind).
Cognitive therapy for a short while plus meditation helped me, it seems.
Forgive yourself. Love thyself. Take care.
One time though, I had a dream where I was successfully running so fast and so smoothly, it felt amazing, better than flying.
It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7, which might explain your dreams being so crazy and full of colors, as in those ages you are still developing "the ability to produce mental imagery" and "narrative skills".
https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2020b.pdf - Chapter "Dreaming Is a Gradual Cognitive Achievement"
But seeing cats and dogs dreaming is fairly common.
Characters and scenes looked a bit like they were out of a Disney movie (Aladdin, Pinocchio, I remember the guards from Aladdin and the princess/fairy from Pinocchio), which I guess I watched a lot when I was young.
This and Sci-hub are two of many examples that bounce me over and over again because I have no inspiration on what to search or how
This site even has an entire primer on how to make a useful search query, because apparently its not even a familiar search bar?
And all the users are like “ah thats not a problem, just be so into this field like me that you already know all the papers you want to read!”
I Google for the paper's abstract then copy its DOI into the sci-hub search.
For some reason in my case I have a vivid dream every night, sometimes multiple per night, and can't remember the last time my sleep was dreamless.
I've heard keeping a dream journal can help you remember/have more vivid dreams, but I only write my dreams down it it affected me very strongly so I can interpret what my psyche is saying, so this only happens maybe once every few months.
So what gives? Why do some people dream a lot more than others?
> Most people have at least 2-4 REM sleep phases at night
One of the things I've noticed in taking a dream journal over the past few years is that when I remember a night's dreams thoroughly, they're often split into a handful of distinct sections, with each one being an almost entirely self contained story and scene. I never made the connection until now but I wonder if each 'scene' is a specific REM cycle.
I recently became very anxious that I was "dreaming less".
Then I remembered that this couldn't be true because my cognition wasn't impaired. This indicates I'm still hitting REM
So what gives?
The answer, I'm not showering in the morning to go to an office.
No shower, no dedicated dream remembering time. Hence the perception of "fewer dreams"
Once I was writing a dream diary. I had a dream, and I was like "this reminds me of another dream I had a few weeks ago". I opened the diary, and saw that the "few weeks ago" was actually yesterday.
So, if the dream from yesterday feels like a few weeks ago, and the dreams before yesterday are either forgotten or feel like an ancient past, it is quite easy to believe that you usually don't dream, even if you actually dream every night.
I'm remembering a particularly vivid dream I had perhaps a month or two ago. I remember the settings it took place in, some of the characters, some of the story elements, though to call it a "story" is a bit of a stretch, just a rambling sequence of unconnected events. I often dream consciously, So I can remember actually wanting to pay attention to how cause and effect worked, but when I woke up, I couldn't recall how stuff managed to happen.
Without that thread running through everything, dream recall would seem to go very against how the brain normally works. Not that techniques can't help anyway.
> To really be sure that an individual does not dream, we would have to follow him for years and perform awakenings from REM sleep to see if he dreamed. If the individual never reported a dream after years of awakenings from REM sleep then we could reasonably conclude that either the person does not dream, that he or she lacks the ability to recall dreams, or that he or she is a liar who, for some reason, wants to conceal the fact that he does in fact dream.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dream-catcher/2012...
I usually have amnesia in the few minutes after I wake up, and I lose everything. Like when I used to drive my mom to work as a teenager, she would wake me up right before, and I would just put on pants and hop in the car. Halfway there, I'd sometimes admit I had no memory of how I got into the car.
But if I am focussing on writing my dream right away, usually by writing it down in detail, I can recall it later.
I'm definitely jealous of people who somehow remember it so clearly without any special time commitment. Dreams always feel like living a second life
In the past i never much noticed or remembered dreaming, only when waking up agitated from a nightmare (hasn't happened in years)
But i've been a double espresso drinker for years. Since i started cutting out the dinner espresso (e.g. having my last coffee at lunch) i dream almost every night (sometimes 2 distinct storylines) and can remember them for a few minutes after waking but they fade quickly after.
Blinds open even slightly: no dreams.
LEDs on electronics uncovered: no dreams.
Full blackout: auditory hallucinations before I’m even fully asleep.
Why it is important is because it tells a story about what's going on in your emotional state that you're otherwise unaware of or repressing in conscious experience. It can also provide solutions. It can be a powerful tool for maintaining mental health and wellbeing.
This isn't to say you should be reading "dream interpretation" guides or speaking to interpreters. The point is we already speak the languages of our own dreams because it's our own mind. What seems like nonsense on the surface quickly reveals itself to have a surprisingly clear meaning on introspection from a slightly different angle. Follow your intuition, listen to your psyche, you wont regret it.
The problem with using guides and interpreters is that you don't know whether they explain your unconscious associations, or just substitute their own.
If you interpret your own dreams, you can be sure that all associations were generated by your own brain. Maybe during the dream, maybe during the interpretation. Who cares; either way, it's about your brain.
My simple interpretation method is to write an outline of the dream, and to some words add an arrow and write what it reminds me of. Usually at least three things in the dream remind me of the same topic -- that is the core message of the dream.
I sometimes dream about code or debugging, especially when my team is working on a deadline. A few times I dreamt of solutions to problems we had. It felt good on the spot, calming and relaxing. Unfortunately, after waking up, they don’t make any sense.
And I actually remember one solution because I constructed a mental model so I would remember the unique groundbreaking solution I have just invented.
Thus I now remember a ball with curved arrows coming in and out, but I do not understand what it means and what problem it solves.
Anyway whenever I "dream" about programming it's almost always a scheduling cue. The exact type of programming, technique, language, etc. will provide details as to the type of scheduling that needs to be done.
For example, an interest in lisp seems to point to high-level, conceptual plan-making/life-design which leads toward a schedule. BASIC interest seems to point toward making a simple schedule / zeit-plan and working up from there. Getting with the program, metaphorically.
I mention this in part because you brought up the deadline...and that is related to schedules and timing.
If I dream about debugging, there's almost certainly a timing issue in my schedule, something unrealistic or problematic.
Just my subjective experience...
Like, if you’re on deadline and pushing through with a few hours of sleep a night, both panicked and not quite sure how you’re getting done what you’re getting done, then you might have foggier dreams, or feel that background panic while in the dream environment.
I’ve only had 1-2 vivid lucid dreams. One was where I was a doctor tending to a patient and we were located in an old cabin that would have been typical in the old west. It was so vivid that it was as if I was remembering a past life.
I’ve also had many deja vu moments where I’m visiting somewhere in real life and I swear I remember it from a dream.
I don't have real nightmares, because I can wake up, since I realise it's not real.
There are only 2 times that i remember that i didn't realize it. ( One quite embarrassing one).
One time when I had a fake wake-up ( i thought I woke up for real and the feeling afterwards that something was off was really weird. Since I already thought I woke up). After a while, i woke up for real ofc, not by my doing.
Another time i needed to go to the toilet and i couldn't. So i tried harder... Yeah, quite embarrassing this one, 10 years ago after a night of going out pretty late...
I do think I'm having less dreams lately. Since I never have the need to try to fetch the dream again. But I'm using my alarm clock again and perhaps that's related.
Fyi, i forget about the dream immediately after standing up.
It's possible that I talk in my sleep, i once woke up during that and had a conversation with my girlfriend before I woke up. Somehow my dream was a visual interpretation of what she said ( while my eyes were closed ofc) and I was way more open than i usually am. She could have asked me anything and I sincerely doubt of i would have been able to dodge a question if I would have wanted that.
Ps. I'm a very irregular sleeper. I can only sleep 3-4 hours and it's almost all REM/deep sleep according to an app that i placed on my bed.
Ps2. If you have trouble waking up. Set a hard noise 10 minutes before the desired time ( 1 second duration), you should get up more easily when the real alarm goes off.
I had similar things happen in high school. For example the first time the teacher explained integrals I had a rough time visualizing the geometry. Having a dream a few nights later of an integral being like an apple peeled into a long strip helped me wake up with a better intuitive understanding of integrals.
There are only 2 times that i remember that i didn't realize it. ( One quite embarrassing one).
One time when u had a fake wake-up ( i thought I woke up for real and the feeling during afterwards that something is off was really weird.
Another time i needed to go to the toilet and i couldn't. So i tried harder... Yeah, quite embarrassing this one...
I do think I'll having less dreams lately. Since I never have the need to try to fetch the dream again. But I'm using my alarm clock again and perhaps that's related.
Fyi, i forget about the dream immediately after standing up.
It's possible that I talk in my sleep, i once woke up during that and had a conversation with my girlfriend. Somehow my dream was a visual interpretation of what she said ( while my eyes were closed ofc) and I was way more open than i usually am. She could have asked me anything and I sincerely doubt of i would have been able to dodge a question if I would have wanted that.
Ps. I'm a very irregular sleeper.
It's great fun to go back and be prompted to remember some of the crazier ones or Ctrl+F to see how often various people and things pop up.
You can find some studies on what is the current thinking regarding dreams, and their purpose and meaning.
No fine-tuning using the dataset, but here's the result of typing in a dream prompt into Talk-to-Transformer:
[PROMPT - a dream from DreamBank] >>> I was putting together a plastic bag full of buttons and sewing paraphernalia. It was time to break out of a Hong Kong prison and I was on the fourth tier cell block. I had to wait till the window washers were busy and distract them by throwing ping pong balls so fire hoses filled with cyanide could be squirted on passers-by. I threw a rock through [...]
[RESULT] >>> [...] a glass door. I was careful not to pull my stitches. I threw another rock out the window. We needed a diversion. I needed to take care of myself. The next thing I knew, I was in a helicopter about to take off. By this point my emotions were in flux, like people around a train wreck. It was hard to know what to do with them. I wanted to be strong but didn't have the will. I wanted to be a martyr. I wanted to be.
For example, I once kept trying to force an elf to teach me how to say certain phrases in their language (in an attempt to see if the AI could invent an imaginary language to some degree of consistency), and the character kept "laughing it off" and abruptly changing the subject.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...
> I'm at a Sunday night church gathering. I'm thinking, "I haven't done this in years." It's crowded. A drunk man next to me whispers, "Reproductive organs." I good naturedly tell him to shut up. I see a big sign that says "Brothers, Jesus..." Later someone, a male, says he has to take part of my reproductive system out. I just play with my nipples and enjoy it, i.e. I have an orgasm. I look at him and say, "I can't do that. I would feel embarrassed that I would have to go to orgasm with people watching." A girl whispers, "You can do it."
Rewriting memories seems to be reasonably well understood, and if the recall mechanism for waking memories reconstructs a plausible story from memories, is it reasonable that the same is happening with dreams?
We always remember dreams, have there been experiments where the paralytic effect of sleep has been blocked? I remember seeing a cat video (ironic) of a cat having that part blocked by drugs or surgery and it jumping like it is catching a bird.
From personal experience there are dreams I remember vividly to dreams that I know I had and then easily forget as I wake up again in the morning. Dreaming is such an interesting phenomenon.
E.g. Dream: I saw my mom and gave her a hug.
Posited cause: I've been thinking about my mom a lot recently because her birthday was last week and I really miss her.
(edited for formatting)
[0]: http://www.dreambank.net/more_info.cgi?further=1&series=jasm...
Even if you start with a single word once every few weeks, in time that can grow.
I do, almost as if it's a photo or video, but some people don't. I wonder how this affects dreams.
I'm 45 and I do not dream very often (or I forget when I wake up). Remembering only a few per year. But, when I was young I dreamed often.
The human mind, and dreams in particular, are fascinating.
I hear it's common.
If anybody's looking for a way to do that, there you go.
for most of my life i never really thought much about how dreams work. i shared the same notion with most people, that they are a kind of sloppy simulation of real life. but it always stuck in my mind that this didnt make any sense: the physics of life are too complicated for the brain to simulate in real time in a way that recreates sensory inputs. and why would the brain have hardware that was dedicated to performing dream simulations? wouldnt that be rather a lot of hardware and energy for no apparent reason? but i always chalked it up as one of the great mysteries of our time and didnt dwell on it. and then the answer came to me.
it is well known that it is possible to "lucid dream." i have experienced this, and it is what precipitated my effort to understand dreams.
the answer is that the brain works with abstractions, it stores everything in the world, physical objects as well as feelings and concepts, as a kind of model that can be recalled. as you experience more things, the library of abstractions grows larger.
you are a small part of your brain. there is a part of the brain that holds a "simulation." this is your consciousness, you live inside this simulation, everything you experience is inside this simulation. it is a simulation of the physical world, but it contains much more than physical objects. it contains mental "primitives" that inform your emotions, your identity and your feelings about the world and your place in it. the non-physical aspect of the simulation might be called the "ego" and people who experience so-called ego-death are actually experiencing the simulation with these things taken out of it. at the core of the simulation is some kind of atomic, immutable "self" that is discreet and separate from all experiences, traumas and emotions. so to make it short, your being lives inside a simulation where the physical world is simulated as well as you as a person.
there are other parts of your brain that manage the simulation. some parts of the brain create new abstractions from sensory data. other parts of your brain monitor sensory data looking for things that it recognizes, looking for abstractions that have already been created. and another part of your brain is responsible for placing those abstractions into your simulation when they have been found in the environment. when the abstraction is placed into the simulation, you experience it. your brain is constantly monitoring reality through sensory data and recreating it in your brain-simulation using "assets" that already exist, assuming there is nothing too new in your environment. it is possible for this machinery to break, which is what we call a hallucination. a hallucination is not the creation of something that doesnt exist, it is the mistaken placing of a pre-existing asset into the simulation. objects are a composite of many different abstractions, and this is why hallucinations can have strange, ethereal or other-worldly qualities. a human figure can be placed into your simulation without the concept of humanity accompanying it, or the presence of a person can be placed without a physical manifestation. all kinds of weird things are possible. the takeaway is that the simulated world that is created for you by your brain is very sophisticated, hard to get right, and the symphony of neural mechanisms to make it all work is probably breathtakingly complex.
why? its an optimization. experiencing raw sensory data is too inefficient. the scope within which you make decisions must be narrowed. and this leads into the answer to dreams: there are other optimizations at play. there is yet another part of your brain that actually looks inward at the simulation and the assets that have been placed within it. it will then guess what other assets should be in the simulation based on experience, and place those assets into the simulation. these guesses assets are the same as any other assets, of course. their presence in the simulation is the same as anything else. they are just as real, in every way, in your experience, as anything else. this optimization probably saves time and energy, saving the brain from going through the long process of interpreting every bit of sensory data and matching it to pre-existing assets. instead, your brain translates the big things and your brain guesses everything else.
when you take this entire system into account, and you take away all sensory input, what do you get?
you get a dream.
what happens when you keep certain parts of the cortex active during sleep? you get a lucid dream.
what happens when you consider the situation where a little sensory input leaks into the brain during sleep? you get a simulation loosely guided by sensory data, just as we all have experienced.
dreams are in reality not simulations but a demonstration of the awesome power of the guessing machinery of the brain. it is not a sloppy simulation, but incredibly good guessing.
the reality you experience in a lucid dream is exactly the same reality you experience when you are awake. dreams are reality with sensory decoupling.
most of the things you experience in your life are guesses. most of the things that you are aware of at any given moment are just guesses. the guessing is so good that it has gone unnoticed.
because the brain uses a fundamental model of abstraction, many parts of life are consolidated, in part, into an abstraction and therefore are very localized in space in the brain. the amount of accuracy and control we will have over matters of the mind with simple electrodes ala neuralink will be much higher than anyone understands.